The Lesser of Two Devils

January 2025 (Second Round)
Scare: Road Trip
Action: Getting A Sunburn
Character: A Scammer
Time Constraint: 48 hours
Length: 400 words

I shouldn’t be doing this—driving into the desert with a sack of money is a sign you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere. But when your sister’s sicko ‘boyfriend’ calls you at the devil’s hour so you can hear her scream for rescue, you follow her down whatever path you must.

The foster homes my sister and I survived forged us into a package deal, so it didn’t take long for Jeff to figure out how to scam us. At this point, we practically reek of famished desperation, with an aversion to law enforcement that must’ve seemed irresistible.

So I hurtle toward the remote coordinates with my heart in my throat. Hunger gnaws at my belly, and my skin burns under the sun’s rays through my open windows whistling in the desiccated air.

An eternity passes before I arrive at the tall rock formation where two cars squat in the shade. Three men surround Grace where she sits, gagged and zip-tied, at their feet. Adrenaline races through me.

This is evil.

Still, I park the car and step onto the sandy earth with shaky legs. “I have the money.” My voice cracks, and I try to swallow, but all the moisture has left my mouth. Everything rides on this.

“Toss it over.” Jeff’s lip curls. “Keys too.”

And there it is. My sister raises her gaunt, tear-streaked face, and a bleak realization jumps between us. I want to tell her I’m sorry, that I’d turn back the clock to a time before monsters if I could. Instead, I throw the items to Jeff. “Let Grace go.”

Their lascivious sneers twist into a deeper ugliness. “And now we have two,” Jeff chuckles.

I scan the desert, but it will bear no witness, so I meet Grace’s pleading gaze. “It’s okay.”

Her shoulders sag, and as the men stalk forward, I let out a shaky breath of pure—

Relief.

Finally, we can eat.

Grace breaks her bindings, and her teeth sink into Jeff’s throat before he can scream. Crimson paints the golden sand as we feast.

Because, yes, we are evil.

And we shouldn’t be doing this.

But in this corner of Death Valley, the larger devils feast on the smaller ones—and we refuse to be small anymore.

After all, if this is the path I must take to feed my sister, I’ll take a road trip through hell any day.

This one came in fifth place in my group and advanced me to the final round. The feedback is below!

WHAT THE JUDGES LIKED ABOUT YOUR STORY

{2124}  “The Lesser of Two Devils” creates a believable bond between these two sisters almost immediately, which is essential to carrying the story. You can feel the care the protagonist has for Grace, especially in the paragraph where she wants to apologize.

{1943}  Wow. This was a very surprising and intriguing story. I liked the reference to the devil in the first paragraph, which created a strong atmosphere and frightening tone at the start of the story. The characterization of Jeff was very strong. I shuddered at him insisting she threw the money and the keys, and I got chills at the statement “And now we have two.” The sudden energy as Grace broke through and attacked Jeff was startling and thrilling. I loved this idea of the “larger devils” feasting on the smaller ones. This was an extremely satisfying ending!

{2376}  You do an excellent job of hooking the reader in with a compelling opening line, and the way you establish the intense stakes with the image of Grace screaming for help over the phone sparks a riveting sense of suspense. The way you leave the reader to assume that our character is way over her head while subtly setting up the reveal to come is some really impressive writing, and the surface tension of the scene before Grace breaks her bindings leaves the reader hanging in dread for the moment we think we’re headed for. The reversal of Grace biting Jeff is one of the best twists I’ve seen anywhere in a long time. And the way that you bring everything together with the callbacks to earlier lines as the story winds down leaves the reader with a delightfully dark ending.

WHAT THE JUDGES FEEL NEEDS WORK

{2124} Although it’s clear that “The Lesser of Two Devils” is stepping carefully in an attempt to set up its reveal, the first half of this story feels disconnected from the second. There’s a hard pivot from Grace seeming helpless to being a monster in no real danger from Jeff. In a longer story, there would be ample space to explore what moral and emotional concerns could be leashing Grace while keeping all of the introduction and more. There isn’t the case here. Consider trimming details in the first half of this story in order to make room for foreshadowing and hints that something beyond physical limitations is constraining Grace (something that would also help characterize her and her sister more). If done tactfully, this won’t give anything away while also making the story smoother. As far as suggestions for cutting, it might be beneficial to trim the sentence-long description of our protagonist’s dry mouth. Also consider condense the introduction – particularly the last sentence; do we need the “aversion to law enforcement” portion? Would “isolation” or another word work in its stead? How many instances of “and” could you cut from this story; how many adjectives are truly pulling their weight? You’re good at what you do. Condense this story to its desperate, nasty core.  

{1943}  I felt that at times, your sentences became a little long and unwieldy. For example, I wasn’t sure that you needed “whistling in the desiccated air” at the end of the paragraph describing her driving towards her sister. You might also consider phrases such as “but all the moisture has left my mouth”, where you’d already shown that she was struggling to swallow. We knew it was hot, so I’m not sure we needed this detail. I wasn’t sure that you needed the quotation marks around “boyfriend” in your first paragraph. I found this a bit distracting, and it created a pause in the flow of the story just as you were pulling us in. I would simply call him her sicko boyfriend, and let us figure out that he was untrustworthy, which you’d really told us with the fact that he was a “sicko”. If the intention was to show us that he wasn’t actually her boyfriend because Grace was conning Jeff by pretending to be his girlfriend, this also felt unnecessary. I would simply let us assume that he was her boyfriend before this drama unfolded. 

{2376}  There’s so much already going right in this story, but something you might consider in a potential revision would be end with the line “and we refuse to be small anymore.” The final line of the current draft leaves us with a satisfying punchline that releases the tension you’ve built up so well, but something you might try instead would be to let the tension linger, leaving the reader with a more ominous cliffhanger of an ending with the suggestion that this is only the beginning and these sisters are now out for revenge. Another idea you might consider would be to provide a hint of what’s to come in the line “My sister raises her gaunt, tear-streaked face, and a bleak realization jumps between us.” You do such a great job of sustaining the misdirection right up to the moment of the reveal, but you might also try pulling a thread loose by tweaking this line so that Grace does something unexpected. If, for example, you recast this line as something like a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth in place of the bleak realization, you could present the reader with a strange moment that will spark a sense of mystery, leaving us with the feeling that we should’ve seen the twist coming, even if the story’s so well constructed that there’s no way we ever would.

Thanks for reading! You can find the rest of my NYC Midnight Challenge entries and feedback here.

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